Saturday, July 1, 2017

Buzz Lightyear for President By Joseph Sobran

GRIFFIN INTERNET SYNDICATE, JANUARY 27, 2004
– In 1960, when I was 14, I was nuts about JFK. The first one, John F.
Kennedy, not the current one, John F. Kerry. I got about thirty JFK
buttons from the local Democratic headquarters, pinned them all to my
shirt, and wore them to school.
Mr. Elliott, my former math teacher, who had a wonderfully dry sense
of humor, took one look at me and said, “Why, Joe! Have you thrown
subtlety to the winds?” I loved that man. His deadpan ribbing always
made me feel like an adult, which is a nice way to help a boy grow up
Of course throwing subtlety to the winds is what politics is all
about. In 1960 I didn’t realize that JFK was establishing a lasting
style of campaigning for the presidency: offering “idealism” and
“leadership,” meaning proposing extravagant missions for the government.
JFK promised a “New Frontier,” which took form (sort of) in the “space
race” that culminated in putting a man on the moon before the Russians
did.Time to buy old US gold coins
JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, promised a “Great Society,” meaning a
lot of new Federal programs. And even today, presidential candidates
are expected to make enormous promises, entailing huge Federal spending.
President Bush is talking about sending men (and women) to Mars, among
other things. Many other things. And he is said to be a conservative!
Utopian reflexes have become part of the job description of the
American presidency. We take them for granted. The idea that the
president is merely an “executive,” that is, executing the laws passed
by Congress, seems pathetic and pusillanimous. Today the president is
supposed to think big, like Buzz Lightyear: “To infinity — and beyond!”
Not so long ago, the writer Henry Allen has observed, politics was a
rather narrow specialty: fat guys in three-piece suits cutting deals in
those famous smoke-filled rooms. Politics pretty much left you alone.
Now it encompasses absolutely everything: the food you eat, the air you
breathe, the clothes you wear. Nothing is off-limits. Politics is life!
Human destiny itself is being decided in New Hampshire!
The historian John Lukacs once caused controversy by writing that
life was fairly free, except for Jews, in Hitler’s Germany. But I can
well believe it. Today’s democracies make the old totalitarian regimes
seem rather quaint by comparison. I suspect that you could light a
cigarette in a restaurant in Berlin in 1936 without even thinking about
it. The tyrants of that era hadn’t even gotten around to the fine
details that obsess today’s democracies, which “protect” us from evils
whose existence our ancestors didn’t even recognize — “homophobia,” for
example.
We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human
history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every
aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and
“progressive,” others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it’s a
fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution.
Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power.
You might think people would at least notice. But so far this age has
received no tag, unlike the Stone Age, Feudalism, the Renaissance, the
Reformation, the Enlightenment, and other eras of profound change that
left nothing as it was before.
Rulers like Nero and Caligula have achieved notoriety for their
personal cruelty, but they didn’t really change — or want to change —
the way people actually lived. Their impact was superficial. However
shocking their own conduct, their subjects weren’t particularly less
free than they’d always been.
In the same way, Bill Clinton’s grossly indecorous behavior hasn’t
made Americans less free; nor has George W. Bush’s apparently more
proper conduct made us freer. The great transformation continues under
both parties. No presidential candidate proposes to reverse it because
none is even aware of it. The only question is how to carry it on.
In the 1940s, Friedrich Hayek intuited the great change, which he
called “the road to serfdom.” He was attacked for suggesting that the
Nazi, Fascist, Socialist, Communist, and Democratic regimes were all in
agreement on the basic premise that the State’s power must keep
expanding. Today, when a “conservative” Republican president assumes
that same premise, who can doubt that Hayek was right?

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“Buzz Lightyear for President” by Joe Sobran was published originally by Griffin Internet Syndicate on January 27, 2004.